Due to the increasing popularity of Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents, often there is a need to store XML data in a relational database. Once an XML document is stored in a column within an RDBMS table, conducting a standard text search on such a document would only search its contents, and such a search can be relatively slow compared to searching strings in a relational database, especially if the XML document is large. A disadvantage is that creating indices on a large text data is inefficient, especially in relation to RDBMS.
One known solution uses an XML extender for the RDMS, which has specially designed mechanisms to store and search XML documents. These XML extenders store the XML data as a parsed tree, instead of storing the data as an XML string. However, a disadvantage is that not all relational databases provide support for such an XML extender.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop a method that would allow to efficiently store and index XML data in relational databases without an XML extender support.